Post Lockdown Performances

It's really awesome that shows are back! Theatres are re-opening, audiences are coming back (albeit still slightly distanced) and you would by the bookings I, and many others have been getting that COVID never existed.

It's fucking awesome. I'm loving the fact that I'm getting busy again and that most weekends I'm doing some sort of show. But I've been speaking with a few working colleagues recently and we've all come to the same conclusion.

Audiences are dicks at the moment.

I know this seems like a really shitty thing to say, and very generalised but since audiences have come back I and many others have noticed that they are a lot harder to work with. I had a children's entertainer friend complain to me recently that children at parties are a lot more distracted than before lockdown. They don't seem to have the attention span anymore and have no concept of what to do in an audience (i.e. watch and enjoy). They are now more open to heckling, joking around or interfering with the show (I've heard of children running up and punching the performers etc with their parents doing sod all about it). You can't really blame the kids though. The last two years they've spent pretty much on their own. No big parties, no social gatherings. For a 5 year old this pretty much means they've never been to a birthday party so they kinda have an excuse. They probably don't know how to behave at a party.

But adults... well that's another story indeed. How the hell do we have adults who have lost the basic social skills when it comes to events and performances. It's only been 18 months without live events, yet now adults are just as bad as the children I mentioned earlier. The same children's entertainer I was talking to told me that most of the adults at these parties see them as an over glorified baby-sitter and they are more than content to spend their time drinking and socialising - which just distracts kids more.

And a lot of the adults I've worked with recently have been hard work. They've been really hard audiences and seem to have lost a lot of the social cues, or even just how to behave in public. And I don't know why. It's almost as if adults have gone "screw it I'm going to let loose now that I can". I saw that one stilt walker recently had to punch an adult in the back of their head because they were grabbing their stilts and ignoring the performer trying to tell them to stop. Admittedly they were drunk but still! In all my years of performing I've never heard of this happening before. And we shouldn't have to put up with this crap, but I think we need to modernise our shows and how we deal with audiences to deal with this new, post COVID mentality people have.

I do think that audiences have changed a lot since lockdown. They are a lot harder work now and as performers we need to learn new ways of dealing with dicks. Performers, we need to make sure now that we are driven, in control and constantly monitoring our audiences. You no longer have the luxury of ignoring idiots in the audience. The whole "nip it in the bud" adage works well here. Any small misbehaviour, you as an entertainer need to call them out on it. Not in an obnoxious way, but in a controlled, professional way.

When someone walks across your stage - don't ignore it. Call them out on it. Fit a joke into it here or there, but don't let it slip. You used to be able to get away with being passive or ignoring twats, but now if you do this they will end up taking control.

As performers, it's now our duty to teach our audiences how to behave in shows again. It may mean we do less show, more people management but I hope that in the future this will lead to shows getting back to normal and us performers finally being able to do the shows we want without having to shut idiots up!